“The Violence of Discourse”: Audrey Wu Clark on Beth Lew-Williams’s *The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America*

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America is a magnificently crafted survey of the “driving-out period” of Chinese Americans on the West Coast of the United States during the 1880s. There are very few histories of early anti-Chinese violence, mainly Scott Zesch’s The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (2012) and Jean Pfaelzer’s Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (2007). These two books are primarily social and political histories, but an overview that incorporates the intellectual and cultural dimensions of this violence is long overdue. Tracing the discourse of anti-Chinese violence and expulsion from West Coast cities, Beth Lew-Williams brings Foucault’s theorization of power as discursive to bear on the “driving-out period.” Engaging with contemporary US diplomatic, imperialist strategies such as preemption (115), The Chinese Must Go most importantly points out how the simultaneous exclusion of Chinese Americans from the West Coast and the opening of China itself for economic exploitation happened simultaneously, shaping the emergence of American empire and contributing to the formation of an ideology of white supremacy. For Lew-Williams, the U.S. discourse of preemption—the military logic to strike before your enemy strikes you that came to the fore after 9/11—has an antecedent in the expansion of white supremacy in the late, postbellum nineteenth century from the South to the West Coast. At its center was the violent objectification of Chinese Americans. That is to say, Lew-Williams connects the more recent adaptation of “preemption” back to earlier moments of political and ethnic violence in the United States. She partitions her book into three parts: (1) “Restriction,” which contains Chapter 1, “The Chinese Question;” Chapter 2, “Experiments in Restriction;” (2) “Violence,” which contains Chapter 3, “The Banished;” Chapter 4, “The People,” Chapter 5, “The Loyal;” (3) “Exclusion,” which contains Chapter 6, “The Exclusion Consensus,” and Chapter 7, “Afterlives under Exclusion.”  A tour de force history of Chinese exclusion, this book also finds beauty within its painful story of discursive racism and outright violence. By carefully recovering the stories of Chinese Americans who were violently pushed out of the United States in the late nineteenth century, Lew-Williams humanizes them within a history of violence, trauma, and dehumanization.

Anti-Chinese violence did exist from the 1850s to the 1870s, Lew-Williams explains, but it was the so-called “Chinese Question” during the 1880s when mass violence against Chinese Americans intensified. Discourse, she argues, fueled this racialized violence. While past scholars such as Zesch mention the Chinese Massacre of 1871, Lew-Williams adds another California lynching in 1887 of a sixteen-year-old Chinese resident, Hong Di to clarify that “the intent” of the anti-Chinese violence “was exclusion” (5). The violence was not random; it connected to a larger political project of pushing out the Chinese from the West during the 1880s. That project was rhetorical and systematic, not just a series of random incidents. Lew-Williams tells the story of another Chinese laborer whom white laborers murdered in his sleep on December 16, 1877, in Port Madison, Washington, which sparked further expulsion of Chinese from and arson in the area. Many Chinese Americans were driven out of Tacoma, Washington Territory in November of 1885 and Lew-Williams cites a total of 168 communities across the U.S. West Coast that drove out Chinese residents from their cities between 1885 and 1886. Isolated incidences of anti-Chinese attacks, she argues, connected discursively—in language and ideology as well as disparate violent actions—to create the “driving-out period.”

One grasps the significance of Lew-Williams’ focus on discourse even more clearly when she turns to the topic of gender and the dynamics of Chinese exclusion. While many historians treat the story of Chinese Americans during this era solely as a labor issue among men, Lew-Williams points out that while the Chinese laborers who were targeted were predominantly male, the Page Act of 1875 also perpetuated the discourse of the hypersexualization of Chinese women. It aimed to reduce the female Chinese American population in the United States as well. Expulsion crossed lines of gender. The anti-Chinese violence caused many Chinese wives to endure the trauma of losing their husbands and sources of income, which further affected Chinese American families and communities beyond just men working in the West. It did not simply force Chinese men out of certain kinds of employment, it also caused entire families to flee, thus linking labor to the larger issues of imagining and enacting differences based on ethnicity in the US West.

Vigilante violence is often imagined outside of intellectual frameworks in historical studies, but in Lew-Williams account, it was anti-Chinese discourse that primarily promoted vigilantism, which was the main preemptive vehicle of anti-Asian hate crimes during the 1880s. Lew-Williams cites the major events of the 1880s, such as the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre in Wyoming Territory, which claimed the lives of 28 Chinese miners, and the driving out of Chinese from Eureka and Arcata, California, in 1885. Between 1885 and 1886, vigilantes drove out thousands of Chinese from West Coast cities. Vigilantism, sparked by California labor leader Denis Kearney’s famous 1877 slogan, “The Chinese Must Go!,” led to anti-Chinese legislation such as the Restriction Law and Exclusion Law (8). Ideas about ethnic differences discursively justified extra-legal, vigilante violence, which then led to exclusion codified in law.

Yet while vigilantism was the main mode of violent expulsion, there were other factors at play as well. Adding to Asian American scholars Robert G. Lee’s and Colleen Lye’s scholarship, Lew-Williams convincingly notices that the model minority stereotype of Asian Americans began to emerge almost a century before the 1960s, when the term was first coined. While not named as such, ideas of the model minority stereotype interacted with emerging conceptualizations of white working-class masculinity to generate anti-Chinese discourse as early as the 1880s.  Tacoma’s probate judge, James Wickersham, perpetuated the model minority discourse by expressing his fear of being “confronted by millions of industrious hard-working sons and daughters of Confucius” (119). Lew-Williams argues that such notions were commonplace: “Popular thought of the day held that the Chinese race was inferior to the white race in most ways, but not all. The Chinese were heathen and servile, but also dangerously industrious” (5). She points out that the invasive model minority stereotype cast the Chinese as greater threats to white America than Native Americans and African Americans who would merely “contaminate” the nation (6). Chinese Americans were dangerous because they might outdo whites in their labor. Thus, the exclusion of Chinese Americans arose out of a more complex formation of white supremacy and imperialist preemption than just condescension. A strange combination of imagining both the superiority of Chinese Americans and their inferiority did so instead. Lew-Williams refers to the importance of Native American land and black labor in shoring up white working-class masculinity out West during the late nineteenth century (6), but demonstrates how the discourse of Chinese industriousness added a different dimension as well: its threat to white working-class masculinity led to the promotion of Chinese exclusion as a “manly” action to save white American labor. In this way, Lew-Williams shows how the model-minority stereotype’s deeper roots before the twentieth century have always supported white supremacy rather than undercutting it.

Although there appeared to be a “consensus” among Democrats and Republicans to legally exclude the Chinese by 1888, when President Cleveland signed the Exclusion Act, there were a few white elites, such as Governor Watson Squire and his wife of Washington Territory, who declared themselves “loyal” to the Chinese, defending them against the threats of white laborers. However, as Lew-Williams points out, “it became increasingly unclear what they meant. Were they loyal to the Chinese workers or simply to the profit their work had produced?” (139). And even these seemingly pro-Chinese sentiments could backfire. Since the Chinese were perceived as enslaved coolie labor, postbellum anti-slavery rhetoric reinforced anti-Chinese hate on the West Coast. One sees the complexities of these ideas play out in Lew-Williams more careful treatment of the legal history of Chinese exclusion. She distinguishes between the Chinese Restriction Law (1882) and the Chinese Exclusion Law (1888), two laws that historians since Ronald Takaki have traditionally conflated, to demonstrate the relation between discourse and increasing violence against racialized Chinese subjects during the era of the 1880s and well into the 1890s. While, as Lew-Williams points out, the Restriction Law “offered a temporary stopgap and began a halting first experiment in federal border control” (54), thus inviting vigilante law enforcement (55), the Exclusion Law was a unilateral Congressional Act that “compromis[ed] an imperial vision of America’s Pacific future” (54). That is to say, whereas Congress voted for the less severe the Restriction Law, hoping to continue a cooperative relationship with China, Congress knowingly threatened that relationship through the Exclusion Law. Moreover, it made the tentative move to establish a white-controlled American West into an official reality. The driving out of Chinese Americans from West Coast cities, along with the Restriction Law of 1882 and Exclusion Law of 1888, then culminated in the 1892 Geary Act, which required the Chinese to register and provide proof of their right to land in the U.S. This resulted in making a hundred thousand Chinese subject to legal deportation. By carefully tracing how these laws were different, yet built on each other to move from ideas of white supremacy to vigilante violence to the codified, bureaucratic, legal means of exclusion, Lew-Williams accounts for the violence that ensued during the “driving-out period.” She shows how violence is a key part of discourse and law, at least in the story of the US conquest of the North American West, not the opposite from it.

At the same time as The Chinese Must Go documents how the insidious discourse of U.S. empire, from harbingers of preemption policy to ironic precursors of the model minority stereotype, fed the expansion of white supremacy from the South to the West after the Civil War, the book also recognizes the agency and humanity of Chinese Americans in the late nineteenth century by noticing a history of resistance to the emergence of exclusion policy. Chinese Americans staged protests against exclusion (196) and they contested the losses caused by vigilante violence (225). White populations on the West Coast objectified and dehumanized Chinese-Americans, but Chinese-Americans insisted upon their subjectivity under difficult circumstances.

Although Lew-Williams doesn’t explicitly use the term objectification itself, the driving-out period entailed what we might call the objectification of a group of people through discursive means. Language then justified vigilante violence, which then fed into official legal acts of exclusion. Overall, The Chinese Must Go presents a more complicated view of white supremacy in the US by turning to the Chinese-American story out West alongside the binary tale of Black and white in American history. It documents the deep history of more recent notions of preemption and it shows how nascent, problematic notions of an Asian “model minority” emerged years before that term came into existence. By noticing the deep roots of more recent concepts and developments in the history of US imperialism and racialized violence, Beth Lew-Williams not only helps us better understand the “driving-out period” in the 1880s, but also shows how it continues to matter in our own time. Lew-Williams has written a groundbreaking intellectual survey that will influence generations of historians and critics to come.